You've been scooped!

It’s such a common experience in research. You’ve worked day and night for years on your project. You’ve generated interesting data and, just as you’re doing the final experiments for the paper, a notification pops up in your email: another group just published similar results. Your heart sinks. Your stomach sinks. Your limbic system catastrophises about the “wasted” effort, the “lost” career, the “inevitable” rejection of that fellowship application you planned to write. And if you manage to come to terms with any of that, your heart sinks again when you think about telling your colleagues. If you haven’t been there yet, be prepared, because chances are you will one day. 
 
Why does it hurt so much? Is it really such bad news? And what can we do about it?

​Most importantly, you can handle it. Resilience is a learnable skill that all of us can improve. Just not in the ways you might think. 
 
We’re told to “toughen up”, or worse “man up”. That can work for a while if you’re OK with stress, burnout, poor health and consequences for family and colleagues. But true, sustainable resilience does not come from ignoring your emotions; it comes from understanding them. 
 
Feel the pain and understand why it hurts so much
Of course it hurts. None of us likes to think of ourselves as ‘second best’. Studies show Olympic silver medallists are less happy with their result than bronze medallists, despite coming second in the world and often first from their country or continent. It’s all about ‘what might have been’ if they had been that fraction of a second faster, jumped a couple of centimetres longer or higher. But there’s nothing about being a gold medallist, or the first to publish, that makes you a ‘better’ person. So where is the logic? After all we’re scientists – we thrive on logic!
 
In fact, science does have a logical answer, in the science of human evolution. The source of confusion is not our emotions, but the unusual environment of modern society that we are not adapted for. None of us evolved to chase Olympic gold or a Nature paper! 
 
How many competitors?
During most of human evolution, being accepted as part of a group was a basic survival requirement. As Owen Eastwood puts it so eloquently in his book Belonging: “Isolation or rejection from a group spelled premature death - those two states still terrify the hell out of us”. What better way to show you were ‘worthy’ of membership than by winning, in whatever activity you were good at? And without 8 billion competitors, you even stood a reasonable chance of winning!

​‘Publish or perish’: a damaging phrase
For all the challenges of modern society, basic survival is not usually a problem. Publications do matter but “publish or perish” is a particularly unhelpful and misleading echo of those primal emotions. Words matter: no-one is actually going to “perish”!
 
In any half-decent research group, your colleagues will not turn on you because you didn’t get there first. If they do, get out quick and find decent colleagues that you, and science, deserve: ones who have your back! After all, another important difference between modern society and our tribal origins is the many choices of who we spend our time with. It pays to choose wisely.
 
Security matters, but is the threat really what it seems?
This is not to trivialise the problem, however. For most of us, our career is one of the most important things in our lives and being scooped could weaken it. But it is particularly rare for another group to publish exactly what we have done, starting from the same point and using the same experimental system and techniques. More likely than not, our data have something important to add which makes them publishable anyway. 
 
Progress in science is based on replication of results, not one-off observations, however much pazzaz they come with. In fact, we would be better leaving the word ‘scooped’ to journalists, because by turning curiosity-led enquiry into a competition it distracts from the vital importance of independent replication.  
 
And what does it mean for your career anyway? Publications by others can bring as much attention to your research field as your own papers. Unless you are in direct competition for funding, their paper may even support your next application. You do need to make a credible case in a funding application that it could be you next time, but it is far from the overwhelming negative it first seems.
 
Truths
We have to face it: competition has its uses. It brings us the energy and focus for achievements we may not otherwise make. It even drove humanity to the moon. But you can’t have the benefits of competition without this unavoidable truth: 
 
Nobody wins every time. 
 
We’re hard wired to remember our ‘defeats’ and play down our ‘victories’, another relic of our primal past that does nothing for our mental health today. You may discount it, but at some point in your career, you will have ‘won’ too, whether it’s a paper or preprint you already published, a poster prize, a well-received presentation or securing your current post. When these times happen we need to celebrate and remember them to balance the inevitable hits that we all take too. 

​If you can calm the catastrophising, and keep your self-belief, that same process of competition can give you the energy for your own next paper. 
 
Make a plan
What else can you do to support your career? You can make sure you have a ‘backup’ project. This will also help if your ‘Plan A’ runs into a dead end. You can post a preprint to date-stamp your findings at the earliest opportunity. You can redouble your efforts to find a less widely studied, but nevertheless important niche for your future work, or a rapidly growing area where there are many different opportunities to explore. You can impress people in other ways: your collegiality, the clarity of your presentations, your organisation, your creativity, teaching or mentoring. As research culture moves away from the old, and increasingly discredited ‘H-index’ mentality, these importance of these skills become clearer, and effective networking can help get them noticed. 
 
But most of all, we must never lose self-belief. The skill is to recognise in advance that such things do happen, and could happen to us, but to know that we will always have the strength to deal with them.